* The world's fisheries, it has been said, are the last domain of the
hunter-gatherer. On land, all significant food production has been taken
over by the garden, the farm, the ranch. At sea, people are still hunting
for their meals, with such improved technology that environmentalists fear
the mass extermination of many fish populations. At the same time, people
are eating more fish than ever. Prices for seafood have risen in general
over the past few decades, while prices for land-based animal products have
fallen.

The solution to this quandary would seem obvious: raise fish in farms
instead of going to sea to catch them. In fact, fish farming is booming,
production volumes growing at an average rate of 10% a year since 1990, with
a production of 36 million tonnes of fish and shellfish in 2000, with China
the world leader. Half the seafood now eaten by Americans is farmed. The
dark side of this shiny picture, critics charge, is that it obscures the fact
that fish farming is an environmental disaster and the products it produces
are not healthy to eat.

* Advocates of fish farming point out that modern mass aquaculture is in its
infancy and there is much room for solution of such problems as exist. To be
sure, there is nothing absolutely new about aquaculture. China's had it for
thousands of years. All that is required is a pond, stocked with species of
fish like carp that can put up with fairly brackish water and live happily on
scraps of rotten vegetables and fruits. Nobody objects to such schemes, as
these fish provide a useful nutritional supplement in poor rural areas and
provide a valuable resource to developing nations.

Modern industrial aquaculture is, if you'll excuse the expression, a
different kettle of fish. It began about three decades ago with the
cultivation of salmon, and then went on to sea bass, flounder, halibut, sole,
hake, haddock and sea bream. These species are much harder to domesticate
than carp. Raising them demands a thorough knowledge of their lifecycles and
careful attention to their living conditions, involving such factors as
stocking densities, water quality, breeding conditions, health monitoring and
maintenance, and nutrition.

Domesticating a fish species takes years of work and a great deal of
research. There is substantial interest in farming cod in Northern Europe,
for example, but it is a tricky fish to domesticate, since unlike many other
fish, cod fry don't hatch with any reserves of nutrients and have to be cared
for from the start.

Of course, simply creating an environment where captive fish can thrive is
only half the challenge. The other half is truly domesticating the fish to
tailor them to desired specifications, such as increased growth rates and
fertility; more efficient conversion of food into body meat; resistance to
disease; and tolerance of cold or poor-quality water. Selective breeding of
tilapia, a freshwater herbivorous fish popular in the US, has resulted in a
domesticated strain that grows 60% faster and is hardier than its wild
cousins. There is considerable interest in genetically modified (GM) fish,
but this work is in its infancy and nobody is farming GM fish just yet.

Fish farming has a double commercial impact. Not only does it increase
supplies of fish, it also allows fish to be supplied to consumers on a
consistent basis, which has had a great positive effect on consumer demand.

* Fish farming, then, has a strong appeal to the consumer, but it is also an
irritant to activists. Fish are usually farmed in pens connected to large
open bodies of water, and waste from fish farms, such as body wastes, dead
fish, and uneaten food, can pollute the sea. Shrimp farming has a
particularly bad reputation for destroying wetlands and mangrove swamps.

There are concerns that overdosages of antibiotics can have subtle long-term
health effects, not only on the fish but on the people who eat them.
Diseases may travel rapidly through the confines of fish pens, and fish often
escape due to storms and other accidents, where they can infect wild fish
stocks. In addition, if the fish that have escaped have been selectively
bred or, eventually, genetically modified, they may overwhelm wild
populations or dilute their genetics with domesticated genes, with
unpredictable effects.

The bad environmental reputation of fish farming does seem to have a basis in
fact, but steps can be, and in many places have been, taken to improve
matters. Fish farmers have been developing new feed formulas that are more
digestible and produce less waste, and have been trying to emphasize vaccines
over expensive and troublesome antibiotics. Work is under way to breed more
environmentally-friendly fish. Finally, in much the same way that an
experienced aquarium keeper knows how to balance different species to keep
the aquarium bubbling along smoothly, different species can be raised at fish
farms to keep things clean, for example using tilapia to tidy up after
shrimp.

To the extent that the critics acknowledge that better management can make
fish farming more environmentally friendly, they point out that the whole
concept still has a fatal underlying flaw. To raise carnivorous fish like
salmon requires fish feed based on fishmeal, and the fishmeal is obtained by
catching "industrial" fish from the wild. These are fish that would
otherwise not be regarded as commercially useful, and so, the critics
conclude, fish farming is not slowing down the depletion of wild fish stocks
-- it's accelerating it by literally expanding the dragnet. This depletion
also has the effect of taking away fish regarded as valuable in undeveloped
countries, where people are hungrier and less fussy about what they eat, to
help provide high-value fish steaks for the tables of consumers in wealthier
countries.

In fact, the catch of industrial fish has been stable for decades. The
reason for this is because fishmeal used to be included in animal feed, but
that use has been steadily cut back, while use by fish farms has increased.
This is only relatively good news, since the catch is still substantial, and
all other things being equal, an increase in aquaculture will result in a
greater need for fishmeal.

Advocates point out that all other things are not necessarily equal, and that
the fishmeal content of fish food has been more than cut in half since 1972.
It is now is only about 30% of the content. Other fishmeal substitutes,
based on soya, rapeseed oil, corn gluten, and yeasts are under investigation.
Furthermore, more fishmeal could be produced by further exploitation of
"bycatch", the incidental but substantial unwanted fish picked up by the nets
of marine fisheries.

Another side to the tug-of-war between critics and advocates of fish farming
is that farming and ranching back on land have environmental impacts as well,
and nobody challenges such activities, though there are those who try to see
that they are better regulated and managed. Similarly, the question of
whether fish farming can clean up its act boils down to, like it or not,
effective government regulation. It is easier in concept to regulate fish
farming, conducted in fixed pens, than marine fisheries, which do their
business on the high seas. Of course, this also implies effective
agreed-upon international standards in order to ensure that things are done
according to the same rules everywhere. It's more bureaucracy, to be sure,
but without it fish farming will never be able to achieve the potential that
its advocates believe it is capable of.

"The Promise Of A Blue Revolution", THE ECONOMIST, 9 August 2003, 49:50.

* On 6 August 1945, three American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers took off
from Tinian Island in the Marianas chain. Some hours later the lead bomber,
flown by Colonel Paul Tibbetts and named ENOLA GAY after his mother, led the
three on a high-altitude pass over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. No great
attention was paid on the ground to the intruders, since a serious attack on
the city would have required a much larger force. The three bombers were
judged likely to be on a reconnaissance mission.

At 9:15 AM, ENOLA GAY released its warload, one oversized bomb named "Little
Boy". At a predetermined altitude the bomb detonated in a explosion orders
of magnitude greater than that of any bomb ever used in war up to that time.
A huge mushroom cloud swelled up over the city. Tens of thousands of
Japanese were killed and the city center was levelled. Three days later,
B-29s paid a similar visit to Nagasaki, with the B-29 BOCK'S CAR dropping a
weapon named "Fat Man", of different design to Little Boy but with the same
awesome explosive power. The atomic age had arrived. Japan surrendered a
week later.

Back at the secret US atomic research establishment in the New Mexico deserts
at Los Alamos, some of those who had worked on the "Bomb", as it would be
presently known, were ecstatic. Dr. Edward Teller, a Hungarian expatriate to
the United States, recollected later: "For some of us, on the whole, it was
pure joy. We succeeded."

His colleague Hans Bethe, a German expatriate, was similarly delighted at
first: "We have won the war, we have ended the war." Then the pictures came
back of what the Bombs had done, and Bethe had second thoughts, finding the
devastation "absolutely overwhelming" and concluding: "It must never happen
again."

Many other physicists who had worked on the project agreed with Bethe,
feeling that they had perverted their "beautiful physics". There was,
however, another faction, Teller the most earnest among them, who now wanted
to go on and develop a weapon whose destructive capability would dwarf that
of the Bomb. They wanted to built a "Super-Bomb", which they nicknamed the
"Super".

* For the moment, there seemed to be no need for such a monstrous weapon.
The Axis powers had been crushed, American soldiers were coming home in
floods and demobilizing, America was literally throwing weapons away, in some
cases flying combat aircraft straight from the factory to the scrapyard.
After the massive destruction of the Second World War it seemed hard to
believe that anyone would want to start another round of fighting any time
soon. Besides, though relations with the Soviet Union were getting steadily
worse, America had the Bomb, nobody else did or seemed likely to in the near
future, so what was the worry? The US held the ultimate power.

One of the men returning to the United States from the Far East was General
Curtis LeMay of the US Army Air Forces, who had directed the B-29 offensive
against Japan. He was reassured to drive down the tidy streets of the
America Midwest, contrasting the peaceful order to the destruction that his
bombers had wrought on every major Japanese city. Always a warrior, LeMay
resolved that he would do everything in his power to prevent the disasters
that had been suffered by Japan and Germany from happening to America.

Most of the physicists who had worked on the atomic bomb project were now
going back to peacetime work. Edward Teller, however, felt that the job was
not really done. He felt that the Soviet Union, under dictator Josef Stalin,
was as big or bigger a threat as the Axis powers had ever been. The Bombs
that the researchers had made at Los Alamos were "fission" weapons, powered
by the breakdown of heavy atoms of uranium or plutonium, cascading in a chain
reaction. What Teller wanted to do was build a "fusion" weapon, in which
atoms of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, were fused together by a fission
explosion to release even greater amounts of energy. He was, in short,
proposing a "hydrogen bomb".

In April 1946 Los Alamos conducted a conference on the Super. For the most
part, the goal of the conference was just to document where the lab was on
the issue before everyone departed. One of the lab's members in attendance
was Klaus Fuchs, another German expatriate who was a British resident. Fuchs
had been sent to New Mexico during the war, covered by assurances from
British assurances that he was reliable. Fuchs found the idea of the Super
interesting, and proposed ideas on how it might be made to work. All the
ideas were discussed and documented, then the conference ended and people
went their separate ways. Teller took an academic position in the US, Fuchs
went back to Britain to continue weapons development work.

* Although the US was in retreat from its wartime posture as a military
superpower, the Soviet Union was not. Josef Stalin had found the American
development of the Bomb disturbing, particularly because they had actually
used the thing. If they used it once, they would almost certainly use it
again.

The Soviet Union had been conducting a nuclear weapons research program for
the past several years. Given the need to crush Hitler's Germany, it was not
and could not be a top-priority effort. Now that Hitler was dead and the
Americans were arming themselves with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Bomb
project went to the front of the priority queue, Stalin signing a degree to
that effect in August 1945, only about two weeks after the American nuclear
attacks on Japan.

The effort took priority over rebuilding the USSR's shattered cities. Soviet
citizens might go homeless, but the Soviet Union would have their own Bomb as
soon as possible, regardless of the expense or environmental damage. The
effort was to be directed, appropriately enough, by Lavrenti Beria, head of
the state security apparatus and one of the most unpleasant people in a
regime not noted for its pleasantness. The massive project was pushed
ruthlessly along, on the backs of forced labor obtained in mass from the
state's network of prison camps, the Gulag.

The USSR had one major ace in the hole. They had the plans for the American
atomic bomb, and so Soviet researchers would not have to go down blind
alleys, wasting effort as the American researchers had. There had been at
least three Soviet agents at Los Alamos, operating independently. Two were
Americans, a machinist named David Greenglass and what amounted to a summer
student, a teenager named Ted Hall. The most important of the trio was,
however, Klaus Fuchs. British security had been negligent in recommending
him to the Americans. Fuchs was bright crimson Red, having fled Germany in
the first place because the Nazis were efficiently crushing the Communists.
His family had been helping Jews escape. His sister committed suicide by
throwing herself under a train while she was being pursued by the Gestapo.

Fuchs was a very valuable agent as he had been in the inner circle of
operations at Los Alamos. Intelligence obtained by Greenglass and Hall was
mostly used as a crosscheck to ensure that Fuchs wasn't providing false data.
Fuchs was by no means finished with his service to the USSR, either. In
1948, he met with a Soviet handler in a London pub and passed on what he knew
about the Super. He was out of the loop with the Americans, though, and did
not know if the US had committed to build such a weapon.

That was not reassuring to Stalin. Back in the USSR, Igor Kurchatov, the
bomb program's technical director, was alarmed by the notion of the Super.
Kurchatov brought in more expertise, including the prominent physicist Igor
Tam, to give the Super concept a good looking over. Tam assembled a group of
his best students, prominent among them a handsome, bright, and earnest young
man named Andrei Sakharov, to work on the problem. Sakharov had been asked
to work on nuclear weapons twice before, and turned down the request both
times. This time nobody asked him.

Despite his reluctance to work on a weapons project, Sakharov found the
concept of a fusion bomb fascinating. Not only did he believe it was
practical, in six months he came up with a new design of his own to do the
job, called the "sloika (layer cake)". It consisted of concentric
alternating spherical layers of deuterium and uranium. Conventional high
explosives would implode the sloika, forcing the alternating layers of heavy
and light elements together, resulting in a fusion explosion. In the
meantime, off the Ural Mountains, Soviet researchers were bringing up the
nation's first nuclear reactor, to breed plutonium for atomic weapons.

* In early 1948, the US was served notice that hopes for a peaceful postwar
world order were unrealistic. Stalin ordered a blockade of Berlin, cutting
off power and ground access to the city. The US and Britain organized an
airlift to resupply Berlin by air, with transport aircraft arriving in
precisely-planned schedules every few minutes over a period of eight months.
Stalin had been outmaneuvered, given a taste of the material power of the
Americans. He chose not to escalate the confrontation by interfering with
the airlift.

That was gratifying back in Washington DC, but now government officials and
politicians were beginning to wonder if the massive disarmament conducted
after the end of the war had been wise. There was some comfort in the
knowledge that the Soviet Union didn't have the technical capability to build
an atomic bomb in the near future, or so many government officials believed.

Curtis LeMay didn't believe in sitting idly until the Soviets developed the
Bomb. In the fall of 1948, he was assigned to take charge of the US Air
Force's (as the Army Air Forces had become in 1947) Strategic Air Command
(SAC). LeMay was determined to build up SAC into an unstoppable nuclear
strike arm that could completely destroy any nation that dared attack the
United States. LeMay started out with an organization characterized by
bombers in a poor state of maintenance, crews with little or no training, and
a generally wretched state of preparation.

He changed that as soon as possible. SAC personnel would work long hours, be
on call around the clock, and LeMay would draw on enormous resources of
money, effort, and expertise. If it came down to a great-power
confrontation, SAC would win the war, and all the rest of the US military
would serve a supporting role at best. In the nuclear age, SAC came first.
SAC would be so intimidating that nobody would dare challenge the US. LeMay
was creating America's first nuclear deterrent force.

If the unthinkable did happen, if somebody was crazy to attack the United
States, then everything had to be in place on day one. There would be no
time to build up forces, as America had in the first years of World War II.
A nuclear war would be decided on the first day. There might not even be
a second day.

The first SAC war plan was in place in 1949. LeMay's bombers would target 70
Soviet cities, military bases, and other sites with 133 nuclear weapons. US
President Harry Truman was not enthusiastic about such plans, saying of the
Bomb: "We will never use it again if we can possibly help it ... " -- and
then went on to the unavoidable conclusion: "... but I know the Russians
would use if they had it."

* That summer of 1949, Kurchatov and his researchers went to the steppes of
Kazakhstan to complete preparations for the first Soviet atomic bomb test.
It took place in August. The blast was kept a secret, but not long before
the shot some American researchers had been prudent enough to suggest that
Soviet nuclear activities needed to be monitored, even though the
conventional wisdom was that the USSR wasn't close to developing a bomb. An
organization was set up to do the monitoring.

Following the explosion, a B-29 carrying air filter systems picked up the
airborne radioactive fallout from the test. After checking the samples
carefully, on 24 September 1949, the Americans announced that the Soviet
Union had detonated an atomic weapon. The announcement caught Stalin
completely off guard. He had believed the secret could be kept, and the
detection of the blast was another unsettling bit of evidence of the
technical lead of the West, though in fact the Americans would have missed it
if it had occurred much earlier. Very well, the cat was out of the bag,
denials wouldn't have been believed, and so the Soviets admitted that they
had tested a nuclear weapon.

If the Berlin blockade had been a wakeup call, the Soviet Bomb was a fire
alarm. America had to mobilize to deal with the threat by all means short of
an all-out shooting match. This state of belligerent armed peace would
acquire a name: the Cold War.

In the fallout of the Soviet blast, Edward Teller decided it was time to put
his Super on the table again. He worked through his contacts, spoke to the
right people, and presently President Truman was being briefed on the matter.
Of course Truman had no way to evaluate the credibility of the proposal by
himself, and so in late October a committee was formed under the umbrella of
the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to analyze the issue in detail and
provide recommendations.

The committee was led by Robert Oppenheimer, who had been the technical
director of the American Bomb project. The consensus that came out of the
discussion was that committing to the hydrogen bomb was premature. It might
not be technically feasible, and the US should focus on building up a
stockpile of fission weapons instead. Two of the committee members, the
prominent physicists Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi, went further and condemned
the whole concept of the Super: "It is clear that the use of such a weapon
cannot be justified on any ethical ground."

They summed it up simply as an "evil thing". Teller was furious. Many
politicians and generals weren't happy with the recommendations, either.
What if Stalin got the Super before the US did? Would not such a monstrous
weapon render America all but defenseless? Truman was persuaded. In January
1950 he committed the US to development of the Super. Congress stood up and
cheered when they got the news.

There was no cheering in the Kremlin. Beria promptly gave the go-ahead on
full development of Sakharov's sloika weapon. Sakharov was transferred to a
secret research city, named Arzamas-16, built on the grounds of a former
monastery 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the east of Moscow. Arzamas-16
didn't appear on any map, nobody mentioned it, in fact the name itself was a
postal drop. The researchers there had plenty of opportunity to focus on
their work, in fact they didn't have any opportunity to do much else. They
were not allowed to leave. Arzamas-16 was comfortable by Soviet standards,
at the top of the queue for comforts, but it was essentially a prison. In
the meantime, Los Alamos researchers were moving onto a wartime schedule,
working six days a week. The race was on.

* Two days after Truman announced the commitment to development of the Super,
newspaper headlines delivered another shock: Klaus Fuchs had confessed to
being a spy and passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviets. His colleagues
from his Los Alamos days were shocked, since they had been very impressed
with Fuchs. Since Fuchs had kept up with developments since that time,
everyone was even more shocked to realize that the Soviets had a very good
idea of the state of nuclear weapons development in the West. The perceived
Soviet threat underwent an immediate growth spurt.

The Los Alamos work on the Super was spinning its wheels, and finally in the
summer of 1950 the net was thrown out to bring in the big guns. Hans Bethe
refused to work on the Super, but Enrico Fermi did come back to Los Alamos to
contribute his expertise. However, Fermi was actually hoping that he could
prove that the Super was an impossibility. Teller later recollected: "When
a man like Fermi told me: 'I hope you won't succeed.' -- that made me feel,
to say the least, uncomfortable."

However, a Polish-born mathematician named Stanislaus Ulam made a significant
step forward when he came up with schemes to simplify the complicated
calculations needed to mathematically model a fusion bomb. Ulam and Fermi
began to construct a series of models based on different assumptions, with
the calculations performed by a roomful of female workers who crunched out
tables of figures with mechanical calculators by hand. No doubt to Fermi's
satisfaction, all the design concepts for the Super that had been considered
up to that time turned out to be duds.

Teller, in his usual unambiguous way, remained optimistic, and suspected that
Ulam was subtly sabotaging the models. However, Teller soon got a second
blow. His old friend John von Neumann, another Hungarian expatriate, working
at Princeton University, was using the latest vacuum-tube digital computer to
do the same calculations in parallel with the Los Alamos effort. Von
Neumann's work showed the Super concepts were duds, too. Teller didn't give
up then either, but Hans Bethe, observing from afar, described Teller as
being "very desperate" at that time. Teller was determined to come up with a
Super concept that worked.

Teller would have felt at least partly vindicated, as well as highly alarmed,
if he had known what was going on at Arzamas-16. The researchers there were
working over Sakharov's sloika design, and it seemed to be looking better and
better all the time. Confined to the research city, the scientists became
totally involved in their work, and the fact that the project was on the top
of the USSR's priority queue only increased enthusiasm.

Although the work at Arzamas-16 remained hidden from the West, at the
beginning of that summer another incident further increased the fears of
Westerners. On 25 June 1950, with obvious approval from Stalin, North Korea
invaded South Korea. The United States was poorly prepared for the war and
was forced back to a perimeter around Pusan, in the southeast corner of the
country. An amphibious landing at Inchon in the northwest, commanded by
General Douglas MacArthur, turned the tables on the North Koreans, who were
badly bloodied and chased back to the northern border of their own country.

General LeMay's B-29s supported the conflict. He originally proposed
fire-bombing all of North Korea's cities into ashes, a proposal that was
greeted with "screams of horror" by his superiors. The B-29s were put to
more limited use, pounding the perimeter around Pusan, then hitting
industrial sites and bridges in the north.

As the war seemed to be drawing to a victorious close, the Chinese Communist
regime of Mao Tse-Tung then sent large numbers of "volunteers" in to North
Korea, turning the tables back on the Americans and their allies, sending
them in rapid retreat. There were calls to use the Bomb and the matter was
investigated. Even LeMay, always willing to use the biggest hammer he could
get his hands on, didn't think it was a good idea. Smashing a country's
infrastructure with nuclear weapons was one thing, trying destroy an enemy
military force in the field, one which was well distributed and hidden, was
another, like trying to use a sledgehammer against a cloud of gnats. Using
nuclear weapons in such a scenario might very well fail, and if it did it
would undermine the credibility of the nuclear deterrent. Performing an
atomic campaign against all of Red China would make sense from a military
point of view, he added, but Truman wanted no wider war.

The Bomb proved unnecessary. The Americans and their allies finally managed
to dig in and hold on the original demarcation line between North and South
Korea, slaughtering the overconfident Chinese counter-counteroffensive with
massed artillery and air strikes. By the end of 1950, the war had settled
into a nasty stalemate that would drag on well into 1953.

The Korean War brought the Cold War to the full depths of its frigidity. It
seemed that once more a totalitarian power meant to dominate the Earth, and
America had been caught off-guard. It wouldn't happen again.

* By early 1951, about a year had passed since Truman had given the green
light on development of the Super, and Los Alamos was still spinning its
wheels. A limited nuclear test, codenamed GEORGE, was being organized, if
simply to provide some raw data to get the program moving in the right
direction. It was also a way to show Washington that the researchers at Los
Alamos weren't simply sitting around and making a pleasant living at
taxpayers' expense.

In fact, GEORGE paid off even before the test was conducted. Design of
GEORGE finally gave Teller more substantial ideas on how to build the Super.
Ironically, he got his inspiration from an idea provided by Klaus Fuchs.

Teller's original Super concept was simple: A can of deuterium would be
stuck on to an atomic bomb, with the simple heat of the atomic blast causing
fusion reactions in the deuterium. This simplistic idea had proven
unworkable. Fuchs had suggested a modified design, including a relatively
small amount of deuterium along with the core of a fission bomb inside a
sealed container. When the fission bomb went off, the radiation it released
would be confined inside the container for an instant before it vaporized.
During this time, the intense radiation would set up fusion reactions in the
deuterium, which would ignite the rest of the bomb.

This was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't enough in itself.
Stanislaus Ulam considered the issue, and then one day his wife found him
staring out the living-room window with a strange expression on his face:
"I've found a way to make it work."

"What work?"

"The Super. It's a totally different scheme, and it will change the course
of history." Ulam modified Fuchs' idea by enclosing the deuterium charge in
a shell of materials that would respond to intense neutron bombardment by the
atomic blast to confine and implode the deuterium. Teller liked the idea,
but wondered if neutron bombardment was the answer. He tinkered with the
idea of driving the implosion with radiation instead, and after some
tinkerings with the idea excitedly realized that he had the solution he had
been looking for.

In fact, almost every physicist who heard the Ulam-Teller scheme thought it
was the way to go. Even Bethe, the Super skeptic, thought it was a good
idea. Teller wanted to be put in charge of the project, but none of the
powers-that-be thought that was a good idea. He didn't have the
managerial skills, he absolutely did not have the people skills, and he was
regarded as too easily diverted by new ideas as they arose.

The wheels began to turn for an initial test of the Ulam-Teller design,
codenamed MIKE, to be conducted in the fall of 1952. Teller thought that Los
Alamos was dragging their feet, argued with the management, failed to
convince them, and then walked out of Los Alamos. He used his political
connections to set up a rival weapons lab at Livermore, California, which
would soon become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he
could make sure that things were done as he wanted them done, and besides,
the competition would help keep Los Alamos on track.

However, Teller was basically out of the loop for the MIKE test. MIKE was
set up on a Pacific Atoll. It was a tall tower with a weight of 73 tonnes
(80 tons) and was emphatically a test, not a weapon -- there was no good way
to delivery a Super that big. The test was heavily instrumented. MIKE was
detonated and it wasn't a fizzle. It was the biggest man-made explosion the
world had ever seen by far, about ten megatonnes, roughly 800 times more
powerful than the atomic bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Edward Teller was watching, if indirectly. He was watching a seismograph in
a basement at the University of California at Berkeley. When he saw the
seismograph trace jump, he knew that his brainchild had worked. He
jubilantly sent a coded message to a friend: IT'S A BOY!

Those witnessing the test more directly, even those who were enthusiastic
about the program, were shocked. The atoll on which the test had been
conducted simply disappeared under the waves. President Harry Truman, who
had authorized the nuclear strikes on Japan, was ambivalent as well. Such
weapons could slaughter a major portion of the world's population, or destroy
civilization, or even possibly sterilize the planet. A policy based on their
development, production, stockpiling, and prospective use was a hard pill to
swallow. The ugly question remained of what the Soviet Union planned to do.

* In March 1953, that question became somewhat trickier to consider. Josef
Stalin died. Obviously that changed things, but in what way? Of course, as
could be expected, there was a struggle for power. Lavrenti Beria was in the
driver's seat early on, and despite his nasty reputation he promptly began to
implement reforms and was in favor of improving relations with the West.
Beria had been in charge of the intelligence apparatus, after all, and he had
the hard data he needed to understand that the USSR was not going to win a
confrontation with the substantially more powerful West over the long run.

Beria's leadership was then successfully challenged by Nikita Kruschev.
Beria was arrested, tried, and shot. While Kruschev's new regime ended the
rule of arbitrary terror that had characterized Stalin's era, it still
remained authoritarian and organized along the lines established by Stalin.
Furthermore, Kruschev remained fearful of the West, too distrustful to expect
anything but confrontation, and prone to inflame such confrontations by
making boastful claims to exaggerate Soviet strength. His approach was later
described as "defending his nation with his mouth."

The new regime promptly announced that the Soviet Union had the H-bomb,
though the first test shot was scheduled to take place in Kazakhstan four
days later. The test was set up in such haste that it wasn't until the last
moment that somebody realized it might pose a threat to the local citizenry
well beyond that of the atomic bomb tests, leading to hasty evacuations.

The test was successful, the sloika worked as advertised. It was not
anywhere near as powerful as MIKE, but it had a major advantage: it was
essentially a real weapon that could be fielded and dropped from a bomber.
The test was a major source of pride for the Soviets, all the more so because
their H-bomb was a purely Soviet invention, not a copy of an American
design.

American aircraft sampled the debris from the test drifting about in the
atmosphere, and Los Alamos immediately assembled a team to analyze the data.
Hans Bethe was able to quickly reverse-engineer the basic design concept of
the sloika, describing it as alternating layers of uranium and lithium
deuteride, compressed by high explosives. Bethe believed that the sloika's
opportunities for growth were limited, and that as a weapon it was not in a
league with a true Super along the lines of MIKE.

* In August 1953, about two weeks after the test of the sloika, new US
President Dwight Eisenhower decided to respond to the Soviet show of force
with one of his own. Following the death of Stalin, there seemed to be
definite movement towards a cease-fire in Korea, and Eisenhower felt that the
process might be helped along by hinting that American patience was not
endless.

He ordered LeMay to send 20 SAC bombers, carrying nuclear weapons, to Kadena
AFB on Okinawa. The bombers were big Convair B-36s, monster aircraft that
had been designed during World War II, featuring six huge piston engines that
drove propellers at the back of the wing, assisted by four jet engines that
had been added almost as an afterthought. It was so huge that pilots
described it as like sitting on your front porch and flying your house around
the sky. The B-36 was slow by the standards of the time and its ability to
successfully penetrate Soviet airspace arguable, but it had long range and
could carry a heavy warload.

The exercise was called OPERATION BIG STICK. It was not a secret, in fact
keeping it secret would have been counterproductive, and reporters were on
hand at Kadena to document the arrival of the bombers. The bombers remained
there on alert while the cease-fire negotiations continued, and ultimately
led to an agreement. Washington concluded, rightly or wrongly, that nuclear
intimidation had been successful. American defense policy now shifted to
even greater weight on the nuclear deterrent.

The US government also ramped up efforts to educate the public on how to
respond to a nuclear attack. Test shots were conducted with shells of houses
and other buildings, populated by storefront dummies, within the blast
radius, to determine how best to survive the blast, with the results filmed
and distributed. Such film would be a great source of sarcastic humor for a
later generation, but they were also shocking with their images of houses
blown away as if by a sweep of a giant hand. Soon, regular alert exercises
would be conducted in American cities.

There was a faction among American physicists who continued to oppose the
Super. In a secret report, Robert Oppenheimer criticised the Super and the
strategic doctrine of targeting enemy cities and their populations. Teller
and his political patrons found Oppenheimer's persistent lobbying against the
Super irritating. In the summer of 1953, the new commissioner of the AEC,
Lewis Strauss, moved against Oppenheimer. Strauss wanted to get
Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked, which would effectively wall him
out of the atomic-weapons development community.

Oppenheimer was vulnerable. During the war, he had made friends with a
number of people who became known as leftists and were suspected as Red
agents, and as it would come out he had lied to protect his brother, who was
closer to the Left than he was. In April 1954, the AEC conducted secret
hearings on the status of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Bethe, Rabi, and
Teller testified. Teller, never inclined to much shade his opinions, flatly
described Oppenheimer as untrustworthy.

Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. Crushed, he went back to the
Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he was director. The
story was leaked to the press and made headlines. Teller did not escape
unscathed. Very few of his peers in the physics community would speak to him
again, probably as much because they feared he might turn on them next as
because of anger over his collusion in Oppenheimer's persecution. Bethe said
later: "I thought that Teller would lose a lot of his friends. I didn't
expect it would go this far. I am sorry for Edward Teller, and he made in
this case a bad decision." Outcast from the physics community, Teller
focused on improving his connections with the Washington power elite.

* While this little political circus was underway, work continued on building
an operational Super. A second test, codenamed BRAVO, was to detonate a
Super small enough to be carried on a B-36, though it was still the size of a
truck. The test took place in March 1954 on Bikini Atoll. The results
exceeded expectations. It was twice as powerful as expected, 40 times as
powerful as the Soviet sloika. In minutes, the mushroom cloud reached an
altitude of 24 kilometers (15 miles). Nobody had expected such a thing, nor
had there been preparations to deal with the plume of radioactive fallout
that fell across a number of inhabited islands. It took two days to evacuate
a few hundred civilians from the affected area. Some suffered relatively
mild bouts of radiation sickness, suffering from nausea, some hair loss, and
skin lesions.

In a few weeks, project researchers got a nasty surprise when they learned
that a Japanese fishing boat, ironically named the LUCKY DRAGON, returned to
Japan with 23 crew, all of whom were suffering from severe radiation
sickness. One died. At first, the US government remained silent about the
BRAVO test, continuing to maintain the blanket of security that covered the
US atomic program, but it was impossible. AEC Chairman Strauss addressed the
public, trying to reassure everyone that the MIKE test had not gone "out of
control."

Even some of the researchers involved with MIKE found the government's
statements hard to swallow. One of them, Herbert York, said later: "I
thought some of the stuff coming out of Washington was pretty silly. They
began to talk about radiation exposure in terms of 'sunshine units' ...
[laughs] ... which I thought was one of the dumbest phrases to come down
the pike in a long time -- y'know, designed somehow to put a happy face on
it, on the impossible."

Back in the USSR, Soviet nuclear researchers were impressed, to put it
mildly, with the American Super test. Igor Kurchatov, who had been
enthusiastic about developing the Red Bomb, and several of his people wrote a
short document for the Soviet leadership warning that a war fought with about
a hundred hydrogen bombs might exterminate all life on Earth. The report
was ignored.

In fact, in 1954 the USSR conducted a test in which an atomic bomb was
dropped near a village in the Urals, with troops entering the contaminated
area a half hour after the blast, wearing some degree of protective gear.
Similarly, the US conducted tests using atomic weapons at the Nevada test
site to see how troops and equipment fared in atomic blasts. Both the Soviet
and American militaries concluded that soldiers could fight effectively on a
nuclear battlefield.

* Andrei Sakharov's work on the sloika brought him to the top of the Soviet
social hierarchy. He was awarded a medal, "Hero of Socialist Labor", and was
treated generously by the state. At age 33, he was head of the theoretical
department at Arzamas-16. He and his people had their work cut out for them
at the time, since reverse-engineering the technology used in the BRAVO test
was top priority. In a few weeks, they had come up with the Ulam-Teller
radiation implosion scheme, and then charged forward on implementing it
themselves.

The Soviet Super was ready by November 1955, a year and a half after the
BRAVO test. Witnesses watched the bomber flying to the test site and covered
their faces with their hands as instructed when the weapon was dropped. It
detonated, with the heat as intense as being in an oven. Moments later they
opened their eyes and saw a huge fireball rising into the sky in total
silence. They fell to the ground as the shockwave approached, with the blast
throwing around large stones and shaking the ground. Due to freak
atmospheric conditions, the shockwave reached towns 80 kilometers (50 miles)
away, blowing out windows and even knocking down doors.

The researchers were overjoyed at the success of their efforts and threw a
party, but soon they had second thoughts. Falling debris had killed a
soldier and a two-year-old girl. Sakharov went in towards Ground Zero and
found the destruction, the litter of burned dead birds, the wreckage of
buildings and equipment, sobering. Kurchatov was becoming more uneasy as
well.

* If SAC's Curtis LeMay had any ambiguities about the H-bomb, he kept them
well hidden. His bomber fleets, now increasingly dominated by the sleek,
fast jet-propelled Boeing B-47, were on constant alert status, in principle
ready to attack the USSR whenever the president gave the word. LeMay put it
clearly, saying that he wanted to convince everyone in his command that they
were not preparing for war: "We're at war now". His bombers probed
at Soviet frontiers, sometimes even penetrating Soviet airspace to get a
reaction. It was like stirring up a wasps' nest.

Up to World War II, the United States had never maintained a powerful
military in peacetime. After every conflict, the military was scaled back
dramatically. Now, for the first time in history that US had a huge
peacetime military force, armed with the most modern and powerful weapons,
weapons far more powerful than any ever built before.

The US continued to push for civil-defense measures. The Eisenhower
Administration sensibly concluded that there was no way shelters would be
effective against the H-bomb, and plans were made for mass evacuations
instead. Exercises and simulations were conducted in which US cities were
"attacked" and the results of preparations were evaluated. The results, even
on paper, were grim, but the administration believed that the civil-defense
preparations were valuable anyway, to help prevent the civilian population
from panicking under attack. Panic would lead to a breakdown in social order
and make life even more difficult for the survivors. Despite the corny
propaganda films of the time, the leadership had few illusions about the
severity of a nuclear exchange.

Not all of the public bought the corny propaganda films, either. Protests
began to arise over the pointlessness of the civil-defense exercises. To no
real surprise, New Yorkers were among the first to defy the exercises. One
woman, Janice Harrison, heard the sirens go off, but didn't bother to leave
the park where she was enjoying the day with her children. Civil defense
personnel told her to take shelter. She replied: "No, I'm not going
anywhere. This is my pahk, I'm sitting here with my children. No."

People were arrested, but that only helped publicize their defiance and
spread doubts. A year later, the same park was crammed with women and their
children in a mass protest over the silly alert exercises. The exercises
went on, and even President Eisenhower was filmed participating in one, with
the apparatus of government retreating to a tent camp. Eisenhower, a
commonsense person, admitted in private that the exercise was futile.

Eisenhower owed everything to his rise to the military, but his experience
had taught him to distrust the military. He knew the nuclear arms race was
not really improving America's security, in fact it was creating a situation
in which the US and the USSR were heading towards mutual suicide. Kruschev
had his worries about it as well. But what could they do about it? Each
side feared the other, each side worried about falling behind, each side
continued their nuclear arms buildup.

By 1960, the SAC warplan envisioned attacking the USSR and Soviet allies with
3,000 nuclear weapons, obliterating a total of 1,000 targets. SAC was now
fielding the new Boeing B-52 bomber, and both sides were rapidly developing
long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would cut the
warning time of an attack from hours to minutes. The name of the game was
"deterrence": to make certain the Soviets understood that if they attacked
the US, they would all die as well. Of course, it worked the other way as
well. The policy acquired a name, "mutual assured destruction", with an
acronym whose irony was obvious to all: MAD.

* Edward Teller was a strong proponent of the nuclear buildup. He developed
a new, compact Super that could be carried on a missile of moderate size,
even on a missile that could be launched from a nuclear submarine. His
nuclear advocacy and familiarity with the government elite did not go
unnoticed by the public, either. Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie DOCTOR
STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, a classic
satire of the Cold War, featured British actor Peter Sellers in the title
role as a parody of Teller, decked out with Teller's trademark bushy
eyebrows. Teller never stopped smoldering over it. Decades later, the first
thing he told a reporter who came to interview him was: "If you mention
Strangelove one time, I will throw you out!"

In the 1970s, the Nixon and Carter Administrations would take steps to scale
back the arms race, but a hardening of positions between the superpowers led
to the rise of Ronald Reagan, the idol of the conservative Right. Mr. Reagan
was impressed when Teller and his disciples proposed that the United States
develop a missile defense system that would protect America from nuclear
attack and end the cycle of MAD. The effort became known as "Star Wars".

Andrei Sakharov continued his work on nuclear weapons as well, but gradually
his protests grew until he transformed himself into the most prominent of
Soviet human-rights advocates, challenging the state's authoritarian
policies. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, which only further
irritated Soviet authorities. By the time he died in 1989, however, the old
Soviet system was falling apart and human rights were coming to the surface.
He did not live to see the ultimate collapse of the USSR a few years later
and the emergence of the uncertain order that followed it, though he did see
the first steps in a gradual reduction of the nuclear arsenals of the
superpowers and end to the military confrontation.

Edward Teller did live to see all of this, to claim in satisfaction that his
promotion of the nuclear option had succeeded after all, helping push the
Soviet Union into oblivion. It is difficult to argue with real certainty
whether Teller was wrong or right.

Notes from "Race For The Super-Bomb", from the PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
series.

* One of the things about spam that makes it annoying, along with its
quantity and intrusiveness, is its subject matter. Spam rarely offers
anything anyone would really want to buy, and many of the things it does try
to sell aren't mentionable in proper company, as well as obvious scams.

According to WIRED NEWS, in an article titled "Turn Back The Spam Of Time" by
Brian McWilliams, certain spam has broken the mold and then some. In the
summer of 2003, a programmer from Iowa named Dave Hill got an message from
the address "Robby0809@aol.com" titled "Time Travelers PLEASE HELP". The
message asked anyone who was a "time traveler or alien disguised as human"
and offered $5,000 USD for anyone who could provide such items as an "Acme
5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement"
and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction
motor". It went said that the sender's life had been "severely tampered
with" and he needed "temporal reversion" to go back in time and make things
right.

Hill assumed this was an off-the-wall joke. He decided to play along and
answered, saying he could provide such items. He managed to get in touch
with a fellow who called himself "Bob White". Other netizens were also
fascinated by what they thought was a gag and got in touch with Bob White, or
"Tim Jones" as he referred to himself sometimes. Nobody was sure just what
was going on. Many, like Hill, thought it was a gag. Some thought the
mysterious "time spammer", as they called him, was trying to get materials
for a science fiction novel, while others thought it was some kind of oblique
scam, possibly to collect validated email addresses for spam lists.

Hill got so much into the joke that he created a fake online store to sell
items out of science-fiction stories, and shipped the mysterious Bob White a
"warp generator", which was actually an old hard disk drive. Then things got
more bizarre. White responded, thanking Hill and asking for more gear. Hill
thought the joke was being taken a little too far and began to wonder if
White was actually "a person challenged by reality and as such deserves our
sympathy and support."

Hill's suspicion was correct. Bob White was traced down and turned out to be
22-year-old Robert "Robby" Todino of Woburn, Massachusetts, who on being
queried about the matter admitted that he had sent out 100 million inquiries
about time-travel technology since November 2001. Todino understands that
the messages he sends out aren't always taken seriously, but he insists that
he is of perfectly clear mind and adds: "A lot of people will say the stuff
I talk about is crazy and out of this world. But I know for a fact that it
is true and does exist. Untrained minds may disagree with me, but they don't
have access to the sources that I do."

He does feel frustrated with the progress of his campaign, however: "It
almost feels worthless now because the people who are monitoring my every
move always seem to win. But it's the only form of communication I have
right now." He believes that there is a conspiracy to block his efforts, for
example interfering with attempts by helpful netizens to teleport a time
machine to Woburn.

His father, Robert Todino SR, has some concerns over his son: "What bothers
me is that some people are trying to sell him equipment and take advantage of
him. He's invested a lot of money into it and has been hurt by it."

The state of Massachusetts also has some concerns with Robby Todino, since
his time-travel-tech spam is just a sideline. Todino is a full-time spammer,
and the authorities have not been happy with his mass mailings of fraudulent
ads for "free government grants" and "detective software". In 2001, Todino
was hit with a $5,000 USD fine and agreed to cease and desist in sending out
bogus email ads.

Todino started churning out the time-travel spams shortly after that. The
state of Massachusetts has been monitoring his activities, but has no comment
on the time-travel spams.